Like the bemusing queerness of Joe Brainard, Wayne Koestenbaum’s aesthetic contains and redefines any medium he happens to chance upon. An established poet, Koestenbaum has also left his mark on the contemporary essay for his pyrotechnic ability to praise, to pick up an author’s works, like James Schuyler’s, and find something even better than just the most astute thing to say. That is, how art makes you feel. How we desire. Sharing his many hats as poet, painter, scholar and academic, his new poem is drawn from a sequence published this month by Nightboat, The Pink Trance Notebooks. In them, as below, Koestenbaum concatenates and concentrates the world to its most monadic units of precious junk, stray memoranda, elusive and sensuous at-hand-ness. Replacing the author’s habitual diaries he had kept for three decades, these new poetic crumbs and quizzical pre-thoughts underlie as well as underline a consciousness committed to beauty, in the hypersalient form of the Barthesian punctum. Thinking is Koestenbaum’s poetry, and as such, it welcomes life’s incompletions, its messy or mottled ongoingness, our sense that art is less about formal consummation than constant interruption, hesitation, that ballsy belief that living is never enough.

Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor

TRANCE NOTEBOOK #21

[surreptitious nookie with a large astronaut]

he held this pen and
therefore polluted it
______________

rubbing his finger
gay along lip as at
Castro Theater seeingGiant

______________

two
penises together in photo
lead to penises together
in Winnipeg, syllogism—

______________

starting from
Paumanok is fine but where
is Paumanok and why is
it fish-shaped?

______________

lining up the
anti-Semites

______________

breast of
shrink in dark near
Thai Orchid—mind
and lit obelisk or observation
scene in Rebel without a Cause

______________

smell of AIDS in Ramrod
the young poet said

______________

hurts
wrist to shake hands with
a pervert

______________

is
Whitman pro-onanism
or anti-onanism? obviously
both, Whitman is
pro-bowel

______________

writing in a Greyhound bus
station in a tiny pad, doing
character sketches as warm-up
for fiction

______________

I took disco
dancing lessons near theater whereAirport played, Baskin-
Robbins afterward, kiss
or not kiss at the door

Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet and cultural critic. His books include most recently The Pink Trance Notebook as well as My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, The Anatomy of Harpo Marx, and the poetry collection Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background. He lives in New York City.